Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
The cavalcade which on Easter Eve swept up to the gates of the Leonine City might have missed the morning audience, overrun the beginning of the baptismal ceremonies, left barely enough time for a quick change and a meal, and none at all for a dash to the sulphur-baths, but there was not a mark or a wrinkle, on those bits of its clothing it was not sitting on; and its horse-harness, its banners, its baggage-mules, and the helmets and spears of its escort were of the same impeccable order.
The opening of the gates, the struggle through the belligerent hordes of the Borgo, the broken-down Schola Saxorum with an apologetic and overworked deacon in charge were, as the Bishop expected, the impoverished sequitur, but that could not reduce the achievement.
England had made its entry in the style with which it should be synonymous. Its forthcoming march to the Baptistry, albeit with a few hundred thousand other pilgrims, should not either do it dishonour.
The good mood persisted for as long as it took them to divest Bishop Ealdred of his robes, and for the over-eager lad Alfred to return from his necessary errand.
‘Well, they got here all right,’ said Alfred, vaulting across to his box and grabbing the fresh shirt held out by his servant. ‘There is no doubt they got here. They’re at the papal palace.’
The Bishop’s arms remained in the air, but his face sank.
‘
Archbishop Juhel?
’ he said. ‘
In the Vatican palace?
’
Goscelin looked round, and Bishop Hermann.
‘No,’ Alfred said, from inside his Holy Saturday tunic. He pulled it down. ‘Macbeth of Alba and his men. No one knows where Juhel is. Macbeth of Alba and his men are lodged in the Vatican palace. And wait,’ Alfred said, ‘till you hear why he stayed so long at Woffenheim.’
It was, naturally, a matter of minor irritation only. The implications,
however, were not minor; and from the moment that Bishop Ealdred, with his entourage, passed through the Porta Castella and crossed the bridge into the city of Rome, he found that his mind tended to return to them.
Riding beneath the triumphal arches and past the Temple of Concord, Bishop Ealdred was not overwhelmed. Before Lyfing had died four years ago, Ealdred had extracted from him all he could learn about Lyfing’s visit to Rome with King Canute.
Macbeth of Alba, he was aware, would know at least as much, and from the same sources. As Thorfinn of Orkney, he had joined the English court as a housecarl immediately after Canute’s return. And as Thorfinn and as Macbeth, he had been favoured of Canute’s wife Emma.
To deliver one’s tribute, for example, one had, as now, to force a path away from the crowds which poured towards the high, gilded dome of the Baptistry with its clutch of oratories huddled about, their doors glinting copper and silver, and equally from the other stream that swirled on round the square double wings of the Patriarchium and up to the portico of the basilica.
Struggling through to the door of the Camera, he glimpsed the Constantine horse, from which a Prefect of the City had once been hung by the hair by one Pope, and to which, in his turn, another Pope had been dragged and left naked.
No wonder the Chair was less than popular. No wonder Lyons and Bremen had refused it. There were other ways of exercising power.
The clerk of the Camera was talkative. He had not himself met the King from the top of the world, but two of his nobles from Alba had called. Civility itself, they had been. And well advised in their gifts to the Camera. For instance, this book. And these vestments.
It was an Evesham gospel, with smith-work by Mannig and Godric. The embroidery was harder to place, but, from Hermann’s face, Bishop Ealdred thought it Shaftesbury needle-work.
In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the King of Alba had paid what was due to the Lord God and the Holy Apostles. It did not do to forget that the King of Alba was still Emma’s protégé.
‘And furthermore,’ said the Archarius, lifting the vestments away, ‘the King presented the white palfrey he was riding, together with its horse-cloth and harness, for the use and benefit of the Abbot of Cluny.’
It did not do to forget that the King of Alba was a man with a number of very good ideas of his own.
As Bishop Ealdred had suspected, it was rather unpleasant in the Baptistry, once the novelty of the handsome little room had worn off: the shallow cistern ringed by porphyry columns upholding their eight-sided galleried entablature; the plated floor; the walls encrusted with mosaics and marbles; the two-tiered cupola that lobbed back the cries and the chanting and the gushing and slapping of the Claudian waters so that, even standing in the outer-ring passage, one felt the ears deaden while the head filled with fumes from the incense.
The Pope administered the sacrament of baptism three times on Easter Eve, and he was now embarked on his third and last service. Water as well as noise and perfume seeped through the doors from the inner room. Soaked and tearful figures in white robes stumbled out, passing the original great porphyry urn with its gold lining, but not the seven silver deer pouring water, or the silver statues of Christ and St John, with the golden lamb standing between, which now lay converted into earrings and bracelets in some pagan grave.
Lands in Africa and in Sicily, in Gozo and Cephalonia, had once supported this room with their tribute. Before the coming of the Saracens, before the Eastern Emperor showed his greed, twenty-five thousand gold solidi each year came to the papal curia from Sicily and Calabria. No wonder this Pope would do anything to get the Normans out.
After the Washing of Regeneration, they witnessed the ceremony of Consignatio in the chapel of the Holy Cross next door, passing the closed doors of the oratory of St Andrew the Constantinopolitan and the oratory of St John the Baptist, whose dalmatic, boxed in the altar, could stop floods or bring rain and ought, said Bishop Hermann, to parade twice a day in the Baptistry.
They attended a Stational Service at the Lateran and rode back with their entourage through the crowded, torch-lit streets and over the Tiber to the hospice.
Supper was found to be over, and the little fish that was left lay like horn on the plate. ‘I wonder,’ said Alfred, ‘what they’re eating in the palace. They’ve done their penance; you heard?’
How a young man of this cast of mind could become Sheriff of Dorset, with its mint at Wareham, its proximity to Emma’s great port of Exeter, might have been hard to understand unless you knew all his antecedents in Flanders and Brionne and Brittany.
Bishop Ealdred said, ‘I take it you are speaking of the King of Alba and his retinue, and, further, that you are surprised that, having come to Rome, they have also troubled to purchase spiritual favour. Why do you suppose that they came?’
‘Why did
we
come?’ said Bishop Hermann. He leaned back against the wall and stuck his feet out. A good businessman, but a trifle too smug: about his wit; about having been chaplain to the King of England. He was only from Mons, after all.
Bishop Ealdred said, ‘Both Alfred and Goscelin know very well why we are here. The King vowed to visit Rome in thanksgiving for his return from his long exile in Normandy. However, his counsellors would not allow him to leave England, things being as they are.’
‘The Godwin family being as they are,’ Alfred said. ‘What penance do you think the Pope will lay on King Edward? Thorfinn has been on bare feet round all the churches.’
‘Macbeth,’ said Bishop Ealdred automatically. He added acidly, ‘Round not quite
all
the churches, surely. There has hardly been time.’ He could feel
his patience leaving him, as it often did when he was hungry. There was bread and cheese and some wine in one of his boxes: he had sent for it.
Bishop Ealdred met Hermann’s knowing eye and frowned irritably. When he, Ealdred, had his audience with Pope Leo, there were a number of topics to be aired that had little to do with King Edward’s spiritual future. Topics to do with the future of Edmund Ironside’s descendants, wherever they might presently be. Such as in Passau, with the widow of Stephen of Hungary? Topics to do with the confirmation of new and worthy bishops much loved by King Edward, such as Ulf, the King’s former chaplain, who had been expelled by his flock and was on his way to the Pope to complain personally.
‘Why has Alba come?’ Bishop Ealdred said. ‘Vanity. Superstition. To gain merit in the eyes of his people. To emulate Canute. As a bulwark against Norway, which has quarrelled with his wife’s father. To please Emma the Lady-Dowager, who he seems to think is going to live for ever. What else is there?’
‘The food, I suppose,’ said Bishop Hermann.
Asleep later on his uncomfortable mattress, mollified with bread and cheese, the Bishop of Worcester did not hear the brief conversation between the oldest and youngest of his companions.
‘
Women?
’ said Bishop Hermann. ‘In the name of Christ, Alfred. It’s Easter.’
‘I’m not in holy orders,’ said Alfred. ‘I don’t care if it’s the day of the Immaculate Conception. If I have to wait more than thirty minutes, I’ll go in and corrupt Goscelin.’
‘It’s almost worth it,’ said Bishop Hermann, ‘to refuse you. And I don’t know why you think I should know. But if I were to guess, I’d say …’ He paused and thought. ‘Try the sulphur-baths.’
The Pope’s banquet took place on the following day, and Macbeth of Alba’s departure feast was held two days later.
The envoys of England were at both, although their initial encounter was of the briefest.
With all the foreign princes and churchmen in Rome, they took part in the great procession that marched from St Peter’s to the Liberian church of St Mary, where solemn Mass was to be heard. The icon painted by St Luke and finished by angels led the way, followed by the Cross, the Deacon, the Primicier, the militia with their red banners and cherub-topped lances, by the notaries, advocates, and judges, by the choir, and by the sub-deacons led by their prior.
After the foreigners came the Roman abbots and the Cardinals with their white horse-cloths. The Pope came next, on a great horse with a scarlet mantle and horse-cloth that battled with the brighter orange-vermilion of his hair and his beard. Two cubicularii carried a baldaquin over his head, and beside him and after him rode the prefect and senators, the nobles and captains and officials from the Campagna, together with the Pope’s personal servants bearing his robes for the rain, and a silk bag containing all he would need for the Mass.
It did not rain. The bells rang, against a great deal of chanting, and incense eddied about, followed by sneezes.
An immensely tall man with black hair, whom Bishop Ealdred did not at first recognise, leaned over and said in Saxon, ‘Lights in St Paul’s. You got the money in, then?’
Languorous behind Bishop Ealdred, Alfred giggled.
Bishop Ealdred said, ‘My lord King. Forgive me. Although it is a long time since we first met in Forres …’
And then broke off, for ahead was the looming bulk, six hundred years old, of the Basilica Liberiana, the church of St Mary of the Snow on the Esquiline Hill.
Inside, the church was immense, with pillars of Pavian marble and a jumble of thin, unmatched bricks from some ancient pillage. The Magi wore Persian costumes and the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, appeared as an Empress of the East in diadem, earrings, and pearls.
Under the wingless angels, the priest Eochaid was emboldened to say to his King, ‘What is it? The audience tomorrow? You have nothing to fear.’
‘No. Yes. I think you should come with me,’ Thorfinn said.
Eochaid waited. When the singing began, he said, ‘If you take anyone, I think it should be Tuathal.’
There was a silence. Then Thorfinn said, ‘If you think so.’ He did not look round.
After a while, Eochaid said, ‘We came here on pilgrimage. It is the Easter service.’
The choiring voices rose, stage by stage, like a fountain. The Pope’s voice, sonorous and impassioned, flowed from their midst.
‘You didn’t tell me the legend,’ Thorfinn said. ‘About the magical circle of snow.’
‘That fell in August? The sort of weather we have in Scone. That’s why they built the church here. I didn’t think you’d be interested,’ Eochaid said.
There was a long interval. Then Thorfinn said, ‘It is a theme in my family. In my stepfather’s family. Lulach’s son will be named Mael Snechta.’
‘Isleifr’s priest-father was named Gizur the White,’ Eochaid said. ‘It is the same idea. The man of magic. The Druid. The White Christ.’
‘I suppose it is,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Tomorrow, I must remember. My oath must carry real conviction. Not to sacrifice to demons. Not to drink the blood of animals. Not to celebrate Thursday. And not to masquerade in the skins of beasts on the Kalends of January. Although it can be chilly in Scone.’
The priest Eochaid was rarely angry, but on this journey he had learned to know when anger would serve him. He said, ‘On this day and in this place, wounded vanity is not the best orator.’
‘On this day and in this place,’ Thorfinn said, ‘my grandfather’s grandson would agree with you, even if my father’s son had reservations. I think we should be quiet. Bishop Ealdred is looking annoyed, and I want him in a good humour.’
* * *
At the papal banquet that followed the service, Bishop Ealdred was in a good humour, for reasons which, to do him justice, were not wholly due to the skill of the Lateran kitchens.
This feast the Pope had chosen to give in the Triclinium, the hall where, two hundred and fifty years previously, another Pope Leo had received Charlemagne. Garlanded on the apse was Leo’s monogram, above the handsome mosaic of Christ, piecemeal in brown against a mathematical blue sky. About him stood the Apostles, and below his feet issued the quadruple rivers of Paradise.
There was mosaic, too, on the flat walls on either side of the apse. On the left, a seated Christ gave keys to a kneeling Pope Sylvester and a banner to the Emperor Constantine, beardless in Frankish costume. On the right, a seated St Peter offered a Roman standard to a kneeling Charlemagne, bearded in blue with bands round his legs; and a pallium to the miniature, folded figure of Leo himself.